NEW YORK – Kiromic BioPharma said this week that it has acquired InSilico Solutions.
Financial terms were not disclosed, though Kiromic said that that the deal involved a stock swap. Kiromic added that it has hired the entire InSilico staff.
The acquisition is meant to beef up bioinformatics at the Houston-based cellular therapy developer. "InSilico in house will mean that our bioinformatics department will have the continuous attention of developers as new developments evolve," Kiromic CFO Tony Tontat said in a statement.
Kiromic already has a proprietary artificial intelligence engine for target discovery, called Diamond.
InSilico Solutions, headquartered in Bengaluru, India, with a US base in Fairfax, Virginia, builds custom bioinformatics applications to help researchers extract meaning from genomic datasets.
Scott Dahlbeck, Kiromic's chief medical officer, said that the firm needs to accelerate its biomarker discovery, selection, and validation efforts to advance its work in immunotherapeutics. "The acquisition of InSilico Solutions is a major step forward in this process, and we are looking forward to the breakthroughs that will result from this expansion of Kiromic's AI capabilities and subsequently its CAR-T," Dahlbeck said.
The companies had been collaborating for three years prior to the acquisition.
"Together we produced a highly effective system that allows Kiromic to identify the needles in the haystack of genomic data — small sections of protein that are specific to the surface of cancer cells and that can be targeted by immunotherapy," said Michael Ryan, chief of bioinformatics for InSilico.